Abstract
The views recently put forward by Fukuyama and Huntington showed that the academic world may once again be ready to think in large patterns of the rise and fall of civilisations. However, long before that, the Buddhologist Trevor Ling put forward a theoretical position regarding the rise and fall of civilisations and the vestigial survival of dead civilisations as ‘religions’. More recently, Naomi Goldenberg put forward a superficially similar, but, on deeper inspection, quite a different point of view on the power relationship between state institutions and the ‘vestigial states’ that contest the state’s monopoly on power and are known to us as religions. This article explored the differences and possible synergies between these two standpoints.Contribution: This article pleads for much attention to be paid to less well-known theories of religion and demonstrates with reference to the theories of Trevor Ling and Naomi Goldenberg how a virtual conversation between older and more contemporary theorists can open up new theoretical and methodological avenues for understanding religion.
Highlights
Contribution: This article pleads for much attention to be paid to less well-known theories of religion and demonstrates with reference to the theories of Trevor Ling and Naomi Goldenberg how a virtual conversation between older and more contemporary theorists can open up new theoretical and methodological avenues for understanding religion
We find Jungian ideas everywhere, except in the formal academic discipline of Psychology, where even Freud is accorded more respect
Two decades before Fukuyama and Huntington put forward their different and very differently influential, views of the mega-patterns of history, the Buddhologist Trevor Ling (1920–1995, viz. the obituary by Willmer 1995), in the introduction to his book ‘The Buddha’ (Ling 1973), presented a view of religion and civilisation that can potentially be used as an explanatory framework for the current state of the world and the place of religions in it
Summary
Contribution: This article pleads for much attention to be paid to less well-known theories of religion and demonstrates with reference to the theories of Trevor Ling and Naomi Goldenberg how a virtual conversation between older and more contemporary theorists can open up new theoretical and methodological avenues for understanding religion. The very first thing a student in Religious Studies at the University of South Africa sees in their curriculum are two definitions of religion: one from Durkheim, an anthropologist, and the other from Otto, a theologian (Strijdom 2019).
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